Field of Disclosure
The present disclosure generally relates to securing sensitive information stored in an electronic device and specifically to detecting an optical fault injection within the electronic device and/or preventing the optical fault injection from introducing an exploitable abnormality within the electronic device.
Related Art
In the digital economy of today, consumers are placing an ever increasing an amount of sensitive information onto their electronic devices. The electronic devices include various types of security modules, such as bank chip cards, subscriber identification units, and/or secure contactless cards to provide some examples, which are specialized to restrict and/or prevent access to sensitive information stored within. The sensitive information can include financial information such as bank account information and/or credit card information, personal information such as social security identification numbers, login information for various websites, and/or contact information and/or other types of sensitive information such as encryption algorithm keys, authentication or identification codes, and/or algorithms implemented for the encryption, the authentication, or the identification.
The increasing speed and density of electronic devices, as well as their reduced power consumption, have made the electronic devices increasingly sensitive to a fault-injection attack. The fault-injection attack is an attempt by an attacker to cause an error within an electronic device to cause it to behave abnormally. Thereafter, the attacker can exploit these abnormalities to identify or create a security weakness which can either expose the sensitive information or allow the attacker to simply bypass security measures within the electronic device.
The present disclosure will now be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the reference number.